1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to inexpensive dedicated electronic games for stimulating and developing mental skills in young children--down to age 7 or 8; and more particularly to such a game that encourages purely spatial-relations capabilities by providing game incentives for successful game moves in an invisible, abstract space.
By "inexpensive dedicated electronic games" we mean to contrast the field of our invention with the field of far more expensive cartridge-type game computers, and also with the field of games based on general-purpose computers that have typewriter-style keyboards.
2. Prior Art
Dozens or possibly hundreds of electronic games have been introduced that accept input information from solely directional input devices such as joysticks or small arrays of pushbuttons. Many or all of these games involve electronically displayed pictures of playing fields, maps or mazes, and many are competitive games in which two or more players participate simultaneously or by turns.
In each of such games the pictorial display generally includes an electronically generated image of at least one figurine or other playing token. The associated directional input device controls the position at which the token appears in the display.
Other types of microprocessor-based activities also have employed directional input devices--including so-called "mice" as well as joysticks and pushbuttons. For example, some very commonly known word-processing programs, spreadsheet programs, and the like, use such input mechanisms for conveying information to computers about screen positions where changes are to be made. In other common programs, directional input devices are used in selection of so-called "icons" to convey information about categories of actions to be performed, etc. In each of these serious applications a simple cursor usually replaces a game token.
In essentially every one of such computer applications, including games, the results of directional input manipulations appear on a more-or-less continuous basis in the pictorial display. The movement of the token or cursor provides visual feedback to the operator.
In such a game the operator usually performs, in effect, as part of a feedback loop to accelerate or decelerate the movement as desired to quickly (but preferably without overshooting) position the token or cursor as desired.
It will be appreciated that such a function on the part of the operator--the player, in the case of a game--may enhance motor skills, coordination, and reflexes. The very point of such a game, however, is to create an artificial visible environment for the exercise of such physical skills, leaving little or nothing to the imagination; and certainly requiring little in the way of powers of visualization.
Accordingly such games may be regarded as representing microprocessor-based activity of one extreme type in which imagination and visualization are minimized while manual dexterity, physical alertness, and quickness of response are brought to the fore.
At another extreme are numerous known computer-based text games, in which only words are displayed. In each such game, words are combined in sentences or sentence fragments to describe an invisible environment through which a player may progress.
(To play these games, a player loads software into a general-purpose personal computer. These games accordingly are outside the field of the present invention, which encompasses only dedicated-electronics games. Text games are discussed here, however, for completeness.)
The player's responses too are verbal--again, sentences or fragments typewritten by the player at the computer keyboard. Thus the computer may display narrative such as "You have entered a room in which there is a ball and a doorway". The player may respond, "Pick up the ball" or "What color is the doorway?"
The computer is programmed to interpret such entries and reply appropriately--even to the extent of controlling progress through the artificial environment verbally described. Implicitly embedded in the computer narrative, in fact, is an enormously complex maze in three (or more) dimensions, as well as extremely complex game protocols.
The maze is not only geometrical, but also interpersonal, in the sense that the player must confront and/or employ many kinds of personalities along the fantasy route to a goal. Often success in reaching the goal depends upon backtracking from a cul de sac, or from a segment of the maze in which adverse events occur.
Such a game both relies heavily upon and also stimulates and develops two distinct groups of capabilities or talents on the part of the player. One of these talents is spatial-relations sense. It includes the ability to visualize the immediate but invisible scene, and the ability to recall all the twists and turns (geometrical and otherwise) previously visualized along the imaginary route; together with the ability to relate the present and the earlier visualizations.
The other of the required talents is verbal ability, including the capabilities to read and understand the narrative, and to develop and type suitable verbal responses. In text games, the verbal ability forms a threshold to stimulation and exercise of the spatial-relations ability.
That is to say, the game is not accessible to would-be players who cannot, at least at some minimal functioning level, read and write. By "write" of course we mean spell, and find keys on a typewriter-style keyboard.
Down to a certain level, such games can be used by children who are willing to enter commands at the keyboard by a laborious, hunt-and-peck process. Such a process can become so laborious, however, that it interferes with the ability to imagine the maze, or with the sensation of continuity of progress through the imagined maze.
At that point, access to such games is effectively foreclosed. Thus for very young children, and also for older children whose verbal abilities are for any reason badly suppressed, access is denied to the stimulation and development of the spatial-relations abilities discussed above.
All the text games, to the best of our knowledge, are single-player pastimes. They lack provision for taking turns, competitive scorekeeping, and other mechanisms that enlist peer pressure in aid of skill development.
Intermediate between the directional-input games with pictorial playing fields, at one extreme, and the text games with invisible playing environments at the other extreme are various other electronic games--such as, for example, the games distributed under the registered trademarks Wizardry, Ultima, and Dungeons & Dragons. Like the text games, these are based upon general-purpose computers, and so are outside the field of the present invention.
Each of these games is "intermediate" in that it generally displays a partial picture of a maze (usually an extremely elaborate multidimensional one) together with a small amount of related narrative or instructions--in effect, the electronic equivalent of a comic-book frame. The player generally enters coded responses at a standard typewriter-style keyboard.
In other words, a player looks at the computer screen and sees a picture, usually in a cartoon representation, of part of his game environment. For example, the screen may show a hallway, extending forward and possibly downward.
During the game the player has or acquires (or both) certain playing characters which serve as game tokens--but they are extremely elaborate tokens. Each usually possesses a complex of abilities and other properties that interact with those of other characters and with the properties of the game environment.
A player's characters are controlled by commands entered at the keyboard. Along the way other characters usually appear, either adversarial or friendly, controlled primarily by the software (although actually, as will be understood, their behavior too is usually responsive to player commands).
These games place a premium on the player's ability to remember enormous amounts of detail that have previously been displayed and traversed. Details to be remembered include not only the geometric twists and turns of the maze, but events and characters that have been acquired or met at various points.
As a general matter, however, the structure of each portion of the maze need not be visualized when first encountered. Unlike the text games, these games reveal the structure pictorially in incremental fashion, by means of the direct views displayed upon the screen.
Walls in most of these games appear to have grids on them, to accentuate the wall contours and the presence of connecting passages. Hallways and rooms are typically many grid units wide.
Hence as a general matter these games show in a direct pictorial way what the playing environment is. It must be noted, however, that these games frequently include special elements that cannot be seen in the pictures.
For instance, secret doors are sometimes provided in the walls (and trapdoors in the floors or ceilings). A player can direct one of the player's keyboard-controlled characters to simply turn and attempt to walk through a secret door.
The player will then find--if a door is in fact present next to the character--that the character has passed through the wall into a secret side passage, which then can be seen on the screen. If no door is present, the computer will respond with a textual, acoustic or pictorial indication that an impossible maneuver has been attempted; and the previous scene will persist.
Analogously, these games sometimes incorporate special so-called "magical" or "scientific" devices that provide abrupt transitions between locations in the maze. Such a device may, for example, be termed a "transporter"; and a player who has access to such a device may, for example, be allowed to move from a present location to a preferred one.
Similarly, in some of these games the fantasy protocols include availability of a "torch" to light the way, or a "light spell" (in the games that emphasize the nomenclature of magic). The torch or light spell allows a player to "see" the tunnel or other pathway--this is, to say, the immediate scene appears on the screen.
In games that have these features, a player can for strategic reasons undertake to traverse part of the maze without such a spell or torch. Under such special circumstances the pictorial part of the screen display is absent. This mode of play, however, is exceptional and almost always very limited; a usual and early object of the game is to obtain and carry light.
Variants of the Wizardry type of game include several games (including one known by the trade name Rogue) in which there is nothing to see until the player attempts to move. If the move is valid, then a simple graphic--representing halls, rooms, etc--begins to cumulatively develop on the screen. Only the portions already traversed are shown; but the computer performs the process of displaying and cumulating the map.
Again, all these game-play portions or variants that employ maze-element invisibility are very limited in duration or degree, or both. They are included here only for completeness.
The player's keyboard-controlled characters that appear in these games are all cooperative, as distinguished from adversarial. Further, in some of these games two or more players can participate, but they do so by taking control of respective keyboard-controlled characters in a cooperative or teamwork mode of play. Hence these games, like the text games, are not competitive.
One other type of prior game shold be mentioned, although it was entirely outside the field of electronic games (not to mention dedicated electronic games). The object of that games was to elicit successful game moves in an invisible maze--and therefore in a space that could be called effectively abstract.
The game consisted of a physically molded miniature maze, formed inside a box. The box has an opaque cover, preventing a player from seeing the maze structure; a small ball was inserted into the maze at a starting position.
The person playing the game would hold and manipulate the entire box in an attempt to move the ball to a finish position. The player's main clue to progress of the ball through the maze--and to the structure of the maze, for that matter--was the sound of the ball hitting the wall of the maze.
Successful play of the game required an ability to visualize parts of the maze from the auditory clues, and to recall information gleaned about the maze structure in earlier efforts.
That game, however, provided no way for a person with developing spatial sense to reinforce and encourage that developing ability by creating a partial visible map of the maze during progress of the game. It also required some manual dexterity and some hand-ear coordination of an unusual sort; these capabilities are often lacking in younger children, once again forming a discouraging barrier to fullest use of the game in developing spatial-relations sense.
Thus, without in the least detracting from the efficacy of all the above-discussed games for their own purposes, it is fair to generalize as follows. Those pior electronic games that accept purely directional inputs, and therefore are accessible to very young children, exercise only motor skills and only in a visible environment.
On the other hand, those prior electronic games that do exercise spatial-relations sense--particularly visualization and recall of unseen geometric abstraction--are inaccessible to most children of age 7 or 8, because of demands placed upon verbal and typing ability, and also in most cases because of very high levels of complexity, and finally because they fail to make direct use of the competitive incentive.
This inaccessibility is most emphatically true for text games, which most fully implicate the player's capacity to visualize unseen abstraction. It is even true, however, of the Wizardry-style and Rogue-style games that dilute the visualization demands by displaying portions of the playing environment pictorially.
Furthermore, we are not aware of any suggestion in the prior art that the visible-maze joystick games might be in any way modified for use in developing spatial-relations sense; or that the enormously complex text games, or Wizardry/Rogue games, might be in any way modified for use by very young children who lack verbal and typing abilities.
As to the mechanical maze-in-a-box game, we are not aware of any suggestions that it might be implemented in any electronic form; or that it might be enhanced by provision of a cumulative mapping function, or that its requirements of dexterity or coordination might be reduced to make it more usuable by younger children.